“No two ways about it, 2003 was a demoralizing year for those of us working for peace and justice. With George Bush in the White House, Arnold Schwarzenegger in the California State House, and Paul Bremer ruling Iraq, it was a chore just to get out of bed each morning. But get out of bed we did…” —AlterNet
Daily Archives: 8 Jan 04
Zoo allows gorillas to hold wake for group’s leader
“After Babs the gorilla died at age 30, keepers at Brookfield Zoo decided to allow surviving gorillas to mourn the most influential female in their social family.
One by one Tuesday, the gorillas filed into the Tropic World building where Babs’ body lay, arms outstretched. Curator Melinda Pruett Jones called it a ‘gorilla wake.’
…Babs had an incurable kidney condition and was euthanized Tuesday. Keepers had recently seen a videotape of a gorilla wake at the Columbus, Ohio, zoo and decided they would do the same for Babs. Gorillas in the wild have been known to pay respects to their dead, keepers said.” (USA Today thanks to adam)
Adam mentioned he has run across other reports of animals mourning their dead. This Google search has more to say about animal grieving (although, because of the syntax I used, you will have to filter out a couple of entries about grieving for animals as opposed to grieving by animals). By the way, I have to react to the anthropocentric phrasing of the USA Today headline and the slant of the story. In this case, because Babs was euthanized, of course they had to make deliberate provisions to bring her body back into the gorilla enclosure for the wake, but should it really be up to their human keepers to decide whether to allow the animals the opportunitiy to grieve?
And:
In another challenge to anthropocentrism:
“Monkeys may visualise a predator or food in response to calls from other monkeys, US researchers say.
Alex Martin and colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland, US, played coos and screams recorded in the wild to captive rhesus monkeys – held stationary – and used a positron emission tomography (PET) scanner to monitor their brain activity.
The calls elicited increased activity in areas of the brain associated with vision, visual memory and movement in humans – the posterior visual-processing regions and the middle temporal and medial superior temporal areas. Screams also activated parts of the brain which in humans are linked to emotion.” (New Scientist)
Fodder for new year’s resolutions?
Fear of new things shortens life: “Animals with an innate phobia of novelty have higher levels of stress hormones after a new experience and die significantly younger than their braver kin, new research has found. The work suggests that a lifetime of fearful stress can take an accumulated toll on health.” —New Scientist Evolutionarily, though, would it not make sense that tolerating higher levels of stress better would be selected for, given the obvious survival value it confers? It is not clear that the health effects of stress on a lab animal bred specifically to be stress- or novelty-intolerant can be generalized to “a lifetime of fearful stress” in an evolutionarily equipped organism. Furthermore, might the study results be turned on their head — one might imagine that it may not be that fearful animals die younger than braver kin, but rather that animals who (for some undiscovered constitutional reason) are going to die younger are more fearful than their kin. As usual, correlation is not necessarily causation. In any case, go out there and try a new thing or two…
Can animals ‘think about thought’?
I thought from reading the headline that researchers were claiming that nonhuman animals might approach having a ‘theory of mind’, the implications of which would be earthshattering. But it turns out they use ‘thinking about thought’ to mean something different and far less momentous. They give nonverbal memory tasks to animals like dolphins and rhesus monkeys but the study design gives the subject the option of declining to complete a task they assess as too difficult, which the researchers take to mean that the animal knows when it doesn’t know. —Guardian.UK. I have not read the study but it strikes me that there are probably behavioral explanations for the subjects’ behavior in the test that do not require us to infer self-reflective abilities. On the other hand, why not? I don’t know. [Now where’s my fish?]
